The Beautiful Stars

When I wrote about the stars about eight days ago, I forgot to remember that I got the idea of thinking about the stars from an incredible book I got in the mail last week.

The Spell of the Sensous is the book's  name, and its author is David Abram.

This book is like a giant diamond with a myriad facets, and  I do not really grasp any of them.  But the book starts with an unforgettable picture of when the author, once when in Bali, stepped out of his hut in the midst of a rice paddy in the middle of the night. Suddenly he was standing in the midst of a boundless skyful of stars. It took him a moment to orient himself to earth and to realize that the rice paddy, being deep in water, was merely reflecting the great sky full of stars and clouds. Visually there was no delineation between earth and heaven; he was surrounded by the starry firmament.  Merely thinking of this makes me dizzy.

This book is so beautiful.  I cannot yet say what he is writing about because I do not yet understand it.  Perhaps I never will.  As I riffled through the book, like riffling through a sky-and-earth-and-water book of stars, I came to the concluding portion of the book where at last I found a little toehold familiar enough for me to grasp onto, so that is where I am starting the reading.

"The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air," is the name of this section. For an asthmatic it's a godsend. It is rich enough to be a whole book by itself.  It's about the Lakota  and the Dine, or Navajo, and their concepts of creation and existence. Just the first premise is overwhelming enough to totally change the way I look at myself instantly.  Basically, it is that the Air is a person, all around us and within us, and we are within it.  How unclearly I put it.  But it is as far as I can conceptualize the idea yet.

Then, looking ahead, there is the idea of speech and words as part of the divine matrix of the air. Think if the air were thick and pink or pale blue, (to give it some substance in our visualization,) and we drew it into us and blew words out with it with our breath, as part of our breath, and think if we could see it.  Doesn't that give us another idea or picture of what the creation around us is like, what it's made of.

And, looking further ahead, I see we are going to get into another of my favorite subjects, the alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet to be precise--its genesis and development and where it came from and how it came into being.  All too complicated for my simple brain, but I can grasp features like little gleams of light from time to time, and I love reading it.  It is wonderful. After I read from this section to the very end of the book, perhaps enough of Air will have entered into me to enable me to understand some of the other chapters. YAZZYBEL